The Bangor bushfire burned 35,000ha of the Southern Flinders Ranges during January and February 2014. The area, adjacent to upper Spencer Gulf in South Australia, is a landscape characterised by elevated ridges and spurs, and deeply incised by gorges.  The ranges support largely intact vegetation which is held within numerous parcels of government land and utilised for forestry, water catchment and conservation purposes. In recent history this landscape has been subject to a number large fires. Prescribed burning activities on public land started in 2006.

Within the Bangor 2014 fire scar were a number of prescribed burns totalling about 400ha, and a bushfire scar of 800ha which resulted from a prescribed burn attempt in 2012. These previously burnt areas were less than 5 years old when the Bangor fire impacted the area with FDIs and rate of spread at the peak of those experienced over the length of the fire.

DEWNR undertook fire severity mapping and modelled fire spread data in order to determine the effect the prescribed burning had on the spread of this fire.

Fire severity was mapped using Landsat8 imagery processed into a Normalised Burn Ratio and ground-truthed using high resolution aerial imagery and by 250 ground sample points within the fire scar. Aerial observation fire perimeters were infrequent (often 12- 24 hours apart), so Phoenix Rapidfire was used to model interpolated fire spread between observations using actual weather observations from nearby automatic weather stations.

The results showed a reduced rate of spread as a consequence of the prescribed burns being in the path of the fire. This is likely to have limited the fire footprint on that day and the subsequent impact when a south-westerly change in weather pushed the fire rapidly to the north-east.